Chapter Nine #2
And then he stepped inside and knew it would only make the perfect home if the entire thing was stripped to bare walls and started again.
The high-ceilinged reception room they’d stepped into glowered—there was no other word for it—with faded glamour.
It was a glamour that would have held no appeal even if it wasn’t faded.
Nothing had been done to mitigate the lack of natural light coming in from the small windows.
If anything, the décor had been chosen to enhance the shadows.
Even the exquisite paintings that lined the reception walls seemed to have been selected for the menace they exuded, and he recognised a variation of Judith with the severed head of Holofernes.
Not wanting to insult Alessia, he kept his initial impression to himself and indicated the tall archway in front of them. ‘Do you want to lead the way?’
Having been staring wordlessly at a painting of the medusa turning naked men into stone, Alessia faced him, her brow creased in confusion.
‘Do you want to give me the grand tour?’ he elaborated.
‘But I can’t—I’ve never been in here before.’
He gazed into her velvet eyes, convinced she was joking. ‘You never visited your grandmother, who lived on the same estate as you? But I thought she only died eight years ago?’
‘She did but she was a miserable witch who hated people and really hated children.’
‘That explains the décor then,’ he murmured.
A glint of humour flickered over her face and then she put a hand to her mouth and giggled.
‘It’s awful, isn’t it?’ She shook her head, her giggles turning into a peal of laughter.
‘Marcelo told me it was bad but I never guessed it was this bad. I’m glad she never let me visit. This would have given me nightmares.’
The weight in his chest lifting at the sight of Alessia with glee etched over her beautiful face and the sound of her husky laughter ringing in his ears, Gabriel couldn’t stop his own amusement escaping. In his laughter was a huge dose of relief.
Since the statement had been released, Alessia had carried herself with a careful deportment around him.
She was unerringly polite but meticulous about not touching him.
.. Not until they went to bed. The moment the light went out, she would wrap her arms around him under the bedsheets and press her face to his bare chest just as they’d done on their wedding night.
But, as on their wedding night, she held herself rigidly, barely drawing a breath.
He could feel the fight she was waging with herself, the rapid beats of her heart a pulse against his skin, but knew better than to do anything more than hold her.
As painful as it was to accept, he’d hurt her deeply.
He couldn’t wipe that hurt out with confidences about his childhood. She needed to learn to trust him.
And so he would lie there with her, under the sheets, her beautiful body entwined with his, holding himself back from even stroking her hair, hardly able to breathe himself with the pain of his desire cramping his lungs, having to push out the memories of the first time they’d laid entwined, both naked, fitting together like a jigsaw.
When he did manage to push aside images that only fired the desire he was having to suppress, his thoughts never strayed from her.
The more time he spent with her, the greater his thirst to know everything there was to know about the woman behind the always smiling, dutiful princess who so rarely smiled for him.
So to see her now, her face alight with the joy of shared absurdity, her laughter still filling his senses...
‘Do you think she put these paintings here to repel people from going any further than the front door?’ he asked, ramming his hands into his pockets to stop them from reaching for her.
God knew how badly he longed to reach for her.
‘I’d put money on it.’
‘She hated people that much?’
‘More.’
‘How on earth did she cope with royal life if she hated people?’
‘By drinking copious amounts of gin. As soon as my mother took the throne after my grandfather’s death, my grandmother announced she never wanted to endure another royal engagement or the company of another human ever again and insisted the stables be converted into a home for her.
When she moved in she demanded—in all seriousness—that her new household be staffed only by mutes.
’ But relating this only set Alessia’s laughter off again as the ridiculousness of her grandmother’s behaviour really hit home, which in turn set Gabriel’s laughter off again too.
Feeling lighter than she’d done in a long time—it was true that laughter was good for the soul—Alessia wiped the tears from her eyes. ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘let’s go and see if we can find her potion room.’
The pair of them were still sniggering when they went under the arch and entered a rectangular room with cantilevered stairs ascending from the centre. The posts at the bottom of each gold railing were topped with a gargoyle’s head.
‘They can go,’ Alessia said, shuddering at the ugly things.
‘The whole lot can go. Shall we start from the top or the bottom?’
‘Let’s start at the top and then we can save the dungeon for a treat at the end of it all.’
He laughed again.
He had a great laugh, she thought dreamily, a great rumble that came from deep inside him and was expelled with the whole of his body.
When he laughed... Just as when he smiled, creases appeared around his eyes, deep lines grooving along the sides his mouth.
.. Just as when he smiled, it did something to her.
She hadn’t laughed like that with anyone since her school days.
‘Did you have much to do with her?’ he asked.
‘Not really, thank God. I was six when my grandfather died so I don’t have many solid memories of her before that.
She would terrorise us at Christmas, Easter and family birthdays when my mother forced her to join us for celebration meals but that was the extent of my interaction with her.
..apart from the time when Marcelo and I were playing tennis and the ball went into what was considered to be her garden, and she chased me off like I was trespasser. ’
Stepping through the first door they came to on the landing, Alessia was relieved that the worst thing about the bedroom was the blood-red wallpaper.
It was replicated in all the other rooms, including the master bedroom.
As she peered into the adjoining dressing room, a walled mirror reflected the four-poster bed back at her and her heart jolted to know that this suite would be the room she would share with Gabriel for the rest of her life, and as she thought this, he appeared in the reflection and their eyes met.
He stood stock-still.
The force of the jolt her heart made this time almost punched it out of her.
For a long moment, they did nothing but stare at each other.
The longer she gazed at his reflection, the more the deep reds and shadows of the room reflected in the angles of his handsome face and the black clothes he wore, giving him a vampiric quality that sent a thrill rushing through her veins and dissolved the lingering humour that had bound them together in a way she had never expected.
She wanted him so badly...
Oh, why was she still resisting? Gabriel was her husband and she was his wife and that meant something.
Because you’re still frightened.
Gabriel’s confiding in her about his childhood and his parents’ divorce had helped Alessia understand him better but it hadn’t changed the deep-rooted instinct to protect herself. If anything it had made it stronger because sympathy and empathy had softened her even more towards him.
He took a step towards her.
A pulse throbbed deep in her pelvis.
The battle between her head, her heart and her body, between the princess and the woman, had been an impossible war to manage since they’d agreed to marry.
With each hour that passed, her longing for him grew stronger.
When the lights went out, her weakness for him almost gobbled her up, and she would lay enveloped in his arms, breathing in his glorious scent, desire filling her from the roots of her hair to the tips of her toes, torturing herself; torturing them both because she could feel Gabriel’s suppressed desire as deeply as she felt her own, which only made things worse.
She was torturing them both.
He took another step closer.
Blood roared in her head.
One more step.
She blinked and there he was, right behind her, towering over her just like a vampire from the films.
The beats of her heart tripled in an instant.
Not an inch of his body touched hers but he stood close enough for her skin to tingle with sensation.
‘I don’t know about you,’ he murmured, ‘but I think we should knock through the adjoining room. Create another dressing room and double the size of the bathroom.’
It was only when Alessia snatched a breath to answer that she realised she’d been holding it. ‘That... Sorry, what did you say?’
His lips twitched but those amazing kaleidoscopic eyes didn’t leave hers. He placed his mouth to the back of her ear. ‘That we should double the size of our bathroom.’
His mouth didn’t make contact but his breath did. It danced through her hair and over her lobe, and then entered her skin like a pulse of electricity that almost knocked her off her feet.
His eyes glimmered. ‘Let’s see what delights the ground floor has for us.’ And then he turned and strolled out of the dressing room as if nothing had just passed between them.
It took a few beats for Alessia to pull her weak legs together.
Where she had to hold the banister to support her wobbly frame, Gabriel sauntered down the stairs with such nonchalance that she wondered if she’d just imagined the hooded pulse in his eyes and the sensuality in his voice.
And then he reached the bottom of the stairs and turned his gaze back to her, and she saw it again. His unashamed hunger for her.